508 Compliance by State

CM1
1

This is a 2 part question/idea that has to deal with 508 Compliance.

  1. Do y’all plan on making your software 508 compliant?  I’ve been looking over state policies that any software that we use must be 508 compliant for employee use.
  2. Do y’all plan on offering any 508 compliance scanning through Percussion?
2

Matt, these are an excellent questions!

3

Hi Matt,

We’ve been working on our VPAT which is a statement of Accessibility for the product.  This will be updated and published with the 5.3 SR1 release.   All of the user interface work that we are doing in the 2nd half of 2016  has WCAG 2.0 compliance requirements.  So the answer is that no we are not fully 508 compliant in the CM1 user interface today, but we do intend to update the product and improve on that support this year. 

The second part of your question is related to the published content.  We have had allot of requests recently for 508 scanning features, we have not decided whether we build or partner for this area.  We have partnered with vendors like HiSoftware in the past.  Many customer’s use SiteImprov.  

All out of the box Percussion widgets should be outputting ADA compliant output, we treat any issues there as critical bugs. 

Hope this helps.

-n

 

4

Hi Nate,

Thanks for the response.  That’s great to hear that Percussion is going to make their software 508 compliant.  I’ve actually been talking to SiteImprove about their services and I didn’t want to go with them if you planned on implementing something.  It would be awesome if y’all could provide SiteImprove inside the software.  Would make integration for my end users a lot smoother.

5

We are currently using Compliance Sheriff by Cryptzone (formerly HiSoftware) for Section 508/WCAG validation of live content. One of the biggest and most pressing challenges for our organization is preventing our 300+ Editors and Contributors from publishing non-compliant content; it’s nearly impossible to maintain ongoing compliance after the fact. (Even the ability to make the “alt” field mandatory for image assets would be incredibly helpful.)

 It would be absolutely fantastic if CM1 had the ability to restrict publishing until page content and other digital assets (PDF, Docs, etc.) first passed validation.

Please make this a top priority.

6

Great idea!  I have added your idea to our backlog list for 508 improvements.